This volume was inspired by a visit that Fergus Millar made to
Finland in 1987. It includes an article by Millar on Roman coloniae in the
Near East, an article by Mika Kajava on the epigraphic evidence for
senatorial women in the Greek East, and five other papers on various
aspects of Roman cultural and administrative
history. It is rather a mixed bag, though the individual contributions are
all interesting in and of themselves.

Millar's article is a major
piece of work, examining three stages of "colonial" foundation in the Near
East. The first is Augustan, represented only by Berytus. The second
occurred in the mid-second century, when three cities received colonial
status in and around Judaea; the third is Severan, at which time it is
clear that colonia had come to have the same implications as other civic
titles like "metropolis," marking a status to which a city could aspire
within the province rather than an indication of Roman settlement or
culture. Millar then goes on to examine extremely complicated questions of
administrative, social and linguistic integration. A full discussion of
this paper would require an article in and of itself.

Kajava's
article is limited to the Republican and Augustan periods, and it is
accompanied by a catalogue, organized by city, of places where women of
the senatorial class are honored. It is a useful collection for
illustrating the point that the wives of Roman administrators began
accompanying their husbands to the
provinces in greater numbers under the principate. Kajava's further
observations that in this period senatorial women were not honored as
independent and private persons, but rather in role of wife, daughter or
mother, and that "even if no male relatives were
mentioned in the inscription, there is good reason to believe that the act
of honoring a woman derived from the activity of her husband or father"
(p. 104) are of more general interest to the study of the status of
aristocratic women at this period. Katariina Mustakallio's article, "Some
aspects of the story of Coriolanus and the Women behind the cult of
Fortuna Muliebris," is an interesting piece arguing that the cult
(celebrated at a site four miles outside Rome) was established as a
"sacral defense of Rome," and its "maternal and constructive aspects" mark
it out as a rival to "destructive male manhood" (p. 131).

Christer Bruun offers a short study of the office of curator aquarum,
looking at the issue of its discontinuance in the second century AD after
a string of distinguished holders of that office up until the time of
Trajan. The paper does no more than confirm a couple observations by Eric
Birley and Ronald Syme, one being that such offices were essentially
honorary ("paid leave" as Birley put it) and that when they lapsed the
duties continued to be exercised by the procurators, who had been doing
the work anyway. The one issue that Bruun addresses anew is that it seems
paradoxical that the office should be abolished by the "pro-senatorial"
Trajan, or Hadrian. Just how "pro-senatorial" either of the rulers was
should, however, be regarded as a very open question indeed. Hadrian was
clearly loathed by a substantial number of senators (hence the difficulty
that Pius encountered in arranging his deification), and there is evidence
to suggest that the outward signs of autocracy were enhanced under Trajan
him self. This point emerges from Simon Price's important article on
imperial funerals in D. Cannadine and S.R.F. Price, eds., Rituals of
Royalty. Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge,
1987).
There is a lot more work to be done on the evolution of the imperial
office in the second century.

The final three articles deal with
various aspects of Roman Italy. Timo Sironen offers an interesting
discussion of native Italian peoples and the inhabitants of Magna Graecia,
showing that Greek culture had a profound influence on life outside the
cities of the region, where, as Ennius tells us, the population in the third
century was bilingual in Oscan and Greek (l. 477 Skutsch). Heikki Solin
looks at two aspects of the administrative history of Roman Capua. In the
first case, he argues that the inscriptions listing the magistri Campani,
show that the magistri (mostly the descendants of freedmen) were not, as
has been argued in the past, the "principal tool" of the municipal
administration. His second point is that the series of well-carved Capuan
grave stelai that have traditionally been dated to the Republic could
continue into the empire. An article by Hannu Laaksonen on the
administrative history of Formiae concludes this volume.

On the
whole this is a worthwhile volume with some interesting material, even
though the spread of subjects falls well short of the unity that a
collection of essays should ideally have.